>>5791078Started young copying illustrated books by Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell covers. he liked to build stuff as a kid and draw plans for them. Dad was a mechanical engineer.
Studied archaeology and got a BA in Anthropology and kept up drawing since it was still useful for his studies. He met Thomas Kinkade there and become friends.
Then he decided he wanted to take it seriously and work for something like national geographic so he went to artcenter to learn to paint, alongside Thomas Kinkade.
But he found it was useless (they were in the middle of going full modern art and discouraging courses that actually taught you how to paint representational art). He met his future wife there and dropped out but used all of her notes from useful classes to keep learning how to paint. Also Kinkade has experience learning to draw and paint before art center so I assume he learned a lot from him too.
Then he went with Kinkade for a sketching trip during the summer of 1980 from California to New York. They both liked the old Guptill published books like Drawing and Sketching in Pencil or Rendering in Pen and Ink so they went to Guptill publishing and shopwed them their sketches and got a deal for an instructional sketchbook and it became a bestseller.
Then they both got a job working on the rotoscope animation Fire and Ice by Frazetta and Bakshi to paint backgrounds. He said they both had no idea how to do so and conned their way in, then he got fired but rehired later somehow (maybe kinkade showed him how to get gud quick). He said he really learned quickly how to paint working on those backgrounds, as they had to produce 11 per week.
In 1983 he got a job working for National Geographic doing illustrations for ancient civilisations which merged his BA and painting skills. This lead to him eventually doing dinosaur illustrations and getting the opportunity to make a book, Dinotopia, in 1992 (1 year before jurassic park).
